The Anthropocene age is marked by increased human impacts on the natural environment. As social beings, humans interact with each other, and with their surrounding environments, often through organizations and institutions. Religion and the polity are among the most influential human institutions, and they tend to impact the natural environment in several ways. For instance, several thinkers have claimed that some of the central ideas of the Abrahamic traditions, such as the concept of “Domination of men over the earth,” are among the causes of several anthropogenic environmental problems. By contrast, some of the ideas of non-Abrahamic, particularly animistic, religions are found to be associated with environmental conservation and stewardship. The polity can also contribute to environmental problems. The relationship between political organizations and environmental degradation, at any level of analysis from local to global, is well studied and established in the literature. Politicizing the natural environment, however, is not without tradeoffs. Environmentalism, by certain groups of people, is considered as a “stigma,” while it is a central concept in the political ideology of another part of the population. This antagonism is harmful to the environmental protection cause. I make the case that religion, or at least a number of religious ideas, can be conducive to the process of depoliticizing the natural environment. In this paper, I strive to draw a theoretical framework to explain how religion and the polity can mutually impact the natural environment.
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